Search Selected Text with Google Chrome

byChrome BlogonSeptember 16, 2008

One Firefox addon i used quite often was a Context Search and what this done was added a selection of Search Engines and useful sites that would enable you to highlight text or a domain on a webpage then launch a search for the selected text on the chosen website.

It was a great time saver because you didn’t need to open another tab for the particular site, then copy and paste your text in to the search box and hit search. This is what it looked like on the right click context menu in Firefox:

This is one extension i miss, so i thought i would “kind of” make a fix for Google Chrome. When i say kind of, these are Bookmarklets which aren’t quite as convenient as having the functionality built directly in to the right click menu however they are still easier than going about things the old fashioned way and will suffice until we get an API for extensions or addons.

So to use these, drag the links below to your Bookmarks. Then whenever you highlight a piece of text on a webpage, click the corresponding bookmark and it will automatically conduct a search on the site you have chosen. So i have done the sites in the Firefox addon, and a couple of other useful searches.

This one above will limit the Google search to just the site you are on, for example if you highlight the word “Bookmark” on this site and click the bookmarklet link it will show all pages listed in Google from ChromePlugins.org that contain the word “Bookmark”. This is quite useful if the site you are browsing doesn’t have a search feature, but they have a great article and you would like to find other similar articles on the site.

Also yesterday i published a whole stack of these in the forum that duplicate the functions of the Google Toolbar, as well as the functions of SEOQuake which is a popular Firefox tool for webmasters and SEO folk. You can view them in the post titled Google Toolbar for Chrome

If you don’t know how to make these site searches for highlighted text and you would like one for a particular site, for example search the highlighted text at AOL.com then just leave a comment below with the site and i will make one and add it to the list for you.

Wit Serdakovskiy: For translation, domain lookup and many other functions please see the forum post Here to enable them. I went through the Google Toolbar and SEOQuake functions and done up bookmarklets to replicate all these features.

We don’t have an API to create addons or extensions to “fully” make things like Firefox has, but these bookmarklets are about the next best thing at the moment for Chrome functionality.

This is great – I’ve been using similar bookmarks in Firefox for years but my javascript was buggy and they don’t work in Chrome. Yours work great so I’ve been able to convert mine over. Thanks for posting it!

Actually there was a much better plugin in Firefox than the built-in feature. It’s called Hyperwords (check out the demo here: http://hyperwords.net/demo.html). If only it could work in Chrome I’d switch immediately.

But right now I actually stick to Opera because it has the same feature (built-in) and even allows to create searches from any search box of any website, and very easily. What you have done take less than a second to create in Opera.

And another feature related to text selection and that I can’t leave without is a simple GoToWebAddress function. In Opera, you select for example a text where a website address is not hyperlinked and that looks like google.com for example, you simply select it and right-click to go to this URL in a new tab.

Finally, one of my favorite feature in Opera I can’t find anywhere else is the concept of “sessions”. IT allows you to save a session of tabs. Say you’re looking for an apartment on Craigslist and have opened 12 tabs with classified ad publishers you want to contact. But you’re too busy to do it right now. Well you can simply save this session as ‘apartment rental’ for example, and open it anytime later. It’s so practical. Even FF doesn’t have that.

That’s why I think Opera is by far the best browser to date. But I admit Chrome has a lot of potential and is amazingly fast. If one day it has these 3 features (and also a google toolbar!!!), I’ll change in a snap. I can’t believe Google didn’t even integrate their own toolbar to Chrome. Total nonsense. I miss in particular the hover translation and the auto-fill features.

How about a feature that allows you to set new downloads to automatically open in the Downloads tab (ctrl+j) instead of popping up down the bottom of the page; and/or an option for the download pop-ups to hide automatically after completion?

Also, after implementing a few of those “Search Selected Text” links offered above, there are no icons on the buttons, just little blank white pages with a turned corner. An option to add/retrieve the icons from their host site would be a nice feature. I like seeing all the icons. It makes me happy! 🙂

Great tips. Thanks you. I do have a question though. Most of the time when I use this feature in firefox I search for many things within the article I am reading and then, once I am done, I flip through the tabs I have opened. What I really want is to be able to use your feature without having to go the the new tab right away. Is there any way to do that. Again, just to be clear, I am hoping to use your cool shortcut feature but have it open a new tab in the background and not interrupt the site I am currently using. Any way this can work. Even the built in Google search does not do this in Chrome.

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